Chimerical Realm

I’m still working out some of the details of the various locations in the local area map, but even still, I’d like to move forward a bit with the next ,and final, sections on world creation—History and Mythology.   Following the World Builder’s Guidebook , I first need to focus on creating a mythology for this world.  I’ve already dabbled in this a bit over the course of creating my world, but this is the first time I’ve focused on it.  To recap, each of the three major human groups are associated with a particular faith—the Fairians follow a bastardized version of the Elven faith, with a heavy focus on ancestor worship and Buddhist-like philosophy.  The Umbrians follow “the Old Faith” one rooted in Druidism, local gods and nature spirits.  The Galts have a primary pantheon of various deities; their faith is unified in a bureaucracy ruled by the Synod—a collection of various high priests and other important dignitaries.  First thing, I need...

Now that I have a fairly decent idea on what the local area looks like.  I move on to placing a few lairs and monsters.  Much like the towns and kingdoms, the The Worldbuilder's Guidebook  includes some very nice handouts for detailing individual lairs. I have a few ideas for specific areas.  First off, I've placed the dragon, and I'm not sure what to do with her. My initial plan was to have her trying to establish her first hoard/nest, and I decide to go with that.  I decide that there is a ruined Elven temple in the area, full of mystery and treasure.  The dragon does not wish to go there herself, and so instead has dominated the local goblins to find it and loot it for her.  Why doesn't she want to go there?  For now, I'm going to say that within this temple lays an ancient Elven hero--buried with her is a powerful dragonslaying sword.  While the weapon is buried and lost, it's energies keep the dragon away.  Besides, she is more in...

I've taken a bit of a pause from working on creating the world to handle some book keeping issues.  This blog is all well and good for forcing me to put my thoughts together and actually doing the work of building a world, but it would not be terribly useful as a tool in game.  Because of that, I'm going to start putting together the first steps in the GM notebook. The World Builder's Guidebook  lists the following components to a GM's notebook Maps of the world, continent, kingdom, city, or adventure region, as required. Character sheets for all major NPC's. A log or short form for minor NPC's. A record of adventures, including treasure found, character developments, and foes overcome. Up-to-date copies of the character record sheets for all the player characters in your campaign. A collection of special notes, rules changes, new items and spells, and similar "customized" touches for your campaign setting. Photocopies of stat sheets f...

Now that I’ve taken care of local cartography, the next step in building my world is detailing the towns and villages of the local area.  The area I’m working with is sparsely inhabited, so none of the villages will be remotely large, which should make detailing them slightly easier.  At this point, I’m not actually mapping these villages, and in fact there’s no pressing need to do so.  Later on,  I might do so, but that might be more of an attempt to see what Campaign Cartographer can do with villages than anything else.  The World Builder’s Guidebook breaks down detailing communities into the following steps.  First, size and population, which defines the community in terms of 500 person “blocks.”  Smaller communities, which we’ll probably be dealing with here, have in general 20d20 (20-400) people. Part of this is also coming up with its physical description.  Secondly, there is a fairly detailed chart indicating the services and jobs av...

I've finally sat down at created a map of the initial play area.  Right now, it's still in "beta"--the basic terrain and settlements are there, but it still needs some work before it's ready to be done.  Here's what I have so far. None of these locations would be larger than a village, and some are even barely that.  The largest, Landsberg en Maas, is the home of a minor Galtic noble who is technically the Baron of this land, but his actual authority doesn't extend any further than the few miles around his village.  He's undertaking an ambitious program, both trying to build a proper stone keep as well as beginning to drain the bog to make it more suitable for agriculture.  Landsberg would be the trade hub of the area, and despite it's small size, would have most of the gear and services that a team of adventurers would need. The three Umbrian/Bog People villages would have only a few hundred members each. From north to south they are Doonbeg...

Back in my first post , I explained a little bit about my inspiration for starting this blog and trying to create an AD&D world.  It was accurate as far as it went, but I skipped an additional, yet major, influence—the Knights of the Dinner Table comic. I recently dug out my old and minor collection of these comics and have been rereading them.  For those who don’t know, Knights of the Dinner Table is a comic series that retells the adventures of a group of D&Desqe players and a satirical look at the most extreme and horrible things that happen in the game.  It doesn’t show the characters but instead focuses on the players as they sit around the eponymous table—a bunch of adults sitting around, rolling dice, yelling out things like “I WASTE HIM WITH MY CROSSBOW.”  It’s supposed to show, in a humorous fashion, the WORST aspects of D&D style game play. And I every time I read them, I want to pick up an Old School game and play that.  I LOVE...

As I begin to think about the local adventure area, the first thing I need to come up with is, well, who the heck lives there.  In my last post, I decided to focus on the north eastern part of the map, particularly the Northern Wastes.  The terrain is dominated by a massive bog, and I’ve rolled that the major industry in this location is, well, industry.  My first thought was that this is a liquor producing place (the various berries that naturally grow in bogs have long been converted to sweet and potent alcohol), but Brian sent me an excellent link regarding Norse bog iron production, which is part of a truly fascinating site. So, thanks to that, Wikipedia, and Google, I have some solid ideas.  The average person lives either in a tiny village or a small family farmstead.  The architecture is based around sod walls and turf built longhouses, which contain all of the family’s cattle and goats.  The people survive with their light farming, their herds...